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WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?

A MEMOIR

Snappy writing, unusual empathy, and an unexpectedly satisfying resolution send this memoir to the front of the pack.

The gradual unraveling of lifelong deceptions about her parenthood teaches a Dominican Chinese woman unsettling lessons about the mutability of identity.

"I wish I could tell you a loving story,” writes Wong near the beginning, “a cross-cultural heart-filled fest of American melting-pot dreams, of how a teenage Dominican immi­grant girl ended up married to a thirty-something Chinese immigrant man, but no." In 12 chapters named for answers to the titular question—"...Because We Lost Our Way," "...Because I Thought We Had Time," etc.—the author traces the often maddening story of her quest for truth in a warmly immediate narrative voice. She begins with a hard fact: Peter Wong, the man she calls Papi to this day, was paid to marry her mother, Lupe, so Lupe's family could get green cards. Lupe and Papi separated when the author was young, and she and her adored older brother were moved from the lap of the Dominican community to the apartment of the man who would become her mother's second husband. "Marty was a white self-proclaimed 'honky' academic type with glasses,” writes Wong, “a head of Italian curls and a bushy mustache, driving a tiny AMC Gremlin hatchback.” The author’s masterful ability to bring characters to life is a key component of the lively narrative. As soon as Lupe became pregnant with the first of four daughters, Marty moved the family to New Hampshire, a bastion of Whiteness. Though Wong’s relationship with her mother was somewhere between fraught and disastrous, and though Lupe died without correcting her most serious lie, the author does a commendable job of trying to understand who her mother was. Regarding the dire outcome of the New Hampshire move, Wong writes of her mother: "from earning her own money, living her freedoms, dressed to the nines, red lips and beauty-shop hair, to sitting at a kitchen table, makeup-less, hair pulled into a utilitarian bun, toddlers at her feet, two hundred miles from all she’d known.”

Snappy writing, unusual empathy, and an unexpectedly satisfying resolution send this memoir to the front of the pack.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-24025-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022

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I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED

The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.

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The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.

In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.

The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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